Review: Sentient (Renegade)

If the artwork in Sentient from Renegade Games is accurate, we look forward to a future filled with shiny intelligent robots and fascinating strategic decisions. And holograms, too. Lots of holograms.

Sentient enlists you in this future as the head of a company that’s working to turn a profit (in victory points) from these intelligent bots by carefully selecting, placing, and putting them to work. If you get the right mix of bots and a strong group of investors, then your company will come out on top.

Let’s look at the top five things you need to know about this futuristic technological world.

Player Companies and the Factory

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At the beginning of the game, players randomly select two boards that represent their company. The right side of each board shows the market segment of the company’s key investor (more about the investor mechanic later — it’s pretty cool).

The left side of the board supports the game’s theme with futuristic panoramas showing the company’s location. When put together, the two boards give each company a unique name (“Capital Consortium,” for example) and set up spaces to organize the player’s dice and robot cards.

About Those Dice

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Each company gets five dice. Although the dice match the colors of the robot types (green, red, blue, pink, and purple), there’s no direct connection between any particular die and a type of robot.

At the start of each round, all players roll their dice and place in them in the matching color-coded spots on their company boards. This sets the stage for the game’s primary mechanic: acquiring robot cards, playing them in the spaces between two dice (what the rules call “plugging them into the network”), and adjusting adjacent dice based on the card’s instructions (called “calibrating”).

Mathing with Robots

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The game system creates a fascinating connection between the the company dice and the robot cards you play. Each type of robot card scores points in a different way.

Information bots, for example, score points if one or both of the dice next to the card show the card’s target number. Service bots use a calculation based on the dice values to determine points. Transport and Military bots compare die values using simple equations like greater than and equal to. Finally, Industry bots look at whether the die values are even or odd.

The Calibration Challenge

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In addition the scoring criteria, each card also displays a plus, minus, or equals sign in the upper right and left corners. These form the “calibration” part of the game mechanic — and can put a serious twist into your strategy (and maybe even kink your brain a bit).

When you “plug in” a robot card by playing it next to your company board, you adjust the two dice next to it according to the card symbols, adding one for a plus, subtracting one for a minus, or leaving it alone for equals. That’s no problem for the first card or two, but as you put more cards into play, the later cards often mess with die values you needed to make the earlier cards work. Gah!

Luckily, you can use one of your five assistants to stop one of the calibration instructions. But you also need your assistants to help you claim investor tokens at the end of the round. This creates a delicious and challenging tension to your strategy. (In fact, it’s one of our favorite parts of the game.)

Scoring the Round and Convincing Investors

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To claim robots, you place one of your four agent playing pieces above the card in an area called The Factory. The Factory has a row of investor tokens and victory point chips with robot cards positioned between them. The agent piece does two things: It marks the position of the card you took and it represents your influence on the on the investor tokens next to it. You can also add one or more assistants with your agent to increase your influence.

After players put all of their agents into place and claim four robots each, players score each of their robots and take victory point chips. Then they see who has the most influence over the five investor tokens. To do that, they compare the number agents and assistants surrounding each investor token. If you have the most, you win the investor. At the end of the game, you multiply the number of investor tokens by the number of your robots that match that investor type, giving you a final total.

The Verdict

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The first time we looked at Sentient, we actually felt a little overwhelmed. Math combined with dice manipulation? Yikes! That sounds like a much deeper strategy game than we anticipated.

Good news — once we dug into the details, we happily discovered that the game was fast, fun, and addictive. We both loved the puzzle and problem-solving aspects, along with the unique balance between strategy, planning, and simple luck of the draw.

Despite the fact that Isaac won every round of this that we played so far (not that Dad’s bitter or anything), Sentient earns a solid thumbs up recommendation. Give it a go at your favorite friendly local game store!

BIO

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John Kaufeld often frets about whether the word “meeple” has a proper plural form. This rarely worries Isaac Kaufeld at all. Recently, the two of them threatened to launch a father and son podcast about gaming, movies, and family life called “And Maybe a Lemon.” Who knows what might happen next?